Briscoe Western Art Museum

San Antonian - Briscoe Western Art Museum - San Antonio, TX

By Dan R. Goddard

Briscoe Western Art Museum

New executive director Tom Livesay says the Briscoe Western Art Museum is sitting pretty on the River Walk.

South Texas is the birthplace of the American cowboy, but Western art didn’t have a home in San Antonio until the opening last fall of the $32 million museum designed by Lake Flato Architects. Originally built in 1930 as the San Antonio Central Library and formerly the Hertzberg Circus Museum, the 54,000-square-foot, three-level facility features more than 700 works of historical and contemporary Western art and artifacts spread across nine galleries. With a $4.1 million annual budget, Livesay manages a 44-member staff.

“The museum is in a good place,” Livesay says. “San Antonio is the only big Texas city that didn’t have a museum of Western art until the Briscoe opened. So we have some catching up to do. Usually, a collection comes first and then a museum is built. We started with a museum and now we need to work on building a great collection, which can take years or even decades. But I like the challenge of a start-up museum and South Texas has some wonderful collectors.”

Organizing an exhibit by Austin photographer John Langmore, scheduling more school tours and preparing to apply for accreditation by the American Association of Museums tops the to-do list for Livesay, who was hired last October. He replaced Steven Karr, the former Briscoe director who left to become president of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City.

“In its first year, the Briscoe attracted nearly 40,000 visitors,” Livesay says. “Our visitors have been about half tourists and about half locals. I don’t plan many changes, but we want to come up with more exhibits and events to attract more visitors.”

Livesay says one major change will be more changing exhibits.

“It’s important to have new things for people to see so they’ll keep coming back and so we’ll attract new visitors,” Livesay says.

With more than 40 years of museum experience, Livesay most recently served as the executive director of the Louisiana State University Museum of Art in Baton Rouge, which achieved accreditation by the AAM under his leadership.

“Accreditation is important because it sets a standard for the institution and will put us on a par with other museums of the West, such as the Amon Carter in Fort Worth,” Livesay says. “I’m working on the paperwork now, but we can’t apply until we’ve been open for two years, which will be in October 2015.”

For the first temporary exhibit at the Briscoe, tentatively scheduled for the fall, Livesay is organizing a solo show by the scion of a distinguished San Antonio photography family. John Langmore is the son of Bank Langmore, one of the best-known photographers of the American West in the 1970s. His mother, Dorothy, ran the Langmore Photographic Studio in San Antonio for more than 20 years. The studio is currently operated by his siblings, Will and Marie.

John Langmore is currently embarked on a three-year project documenting American’s “big outfit” cowboys who work on the top one percent of ranches that run 5,000 to 10,000 head of cattle and operate on as many as a million acres. He’s also known for his long-term photographic projects on East Austin and Oaxaca, Mexico.

“John has been taking some powerful black-and-white images of working cowboys and this is the right time in his career for a major show,” Livesay says. “We want to show the contemporary West as well as the historical West of the 19th century.”

The Langmore exhibit probably will be installed on one of the three floors of the 21,000-square-foot Jack Guenther Pavilion.

“We’ll use about 5,000-square-feet of exhibit space, which still leaves plenty of room for our fundraising events,” Livesay says.

Historical objects on view at the Briscoe range from Santa Anna’s sword to James Nathan Muir’s larger-than-life-size bronze of Col. Travis drawing the famous line in the sand at the Alamo. A full-scale replica of a Wells Fargo stagecoach in the main first-floor gallery runs over rocks and a rattlesnake beneath wild horses painted by famed California muralist Millard Sheets.

Evoking the Spanish colonial era and the influence of Mexican vaqueros on the development of American cowboys in South Texas are a large selection of art and artifacts provided by South Texas cattle rancher Enrique E. Guerra and his family, including an 1870 haciendado saddle profiled in the January issue of Texas Monthly.

More than 10 years ago, the late Gov. Dolph Briscoe began the process of museum-building with a $4 million gift. Furniture from his home office in Uvalde is on display along with two paintings from his collection, a Hill Country landscape, sans bluebonnets, by Porfirio Salinas and Melvin Warren’s Rojo Caballeros, Mexican-American cowboys tending livestock in a dust storm.

Billionaire San Antonio businessman B.J. “Red” McCombs lent more than 70 objects, including a 1700s-vintage siege cannon used at the Alamo shown alongside a stirring, scale-model diorama of the 1836 battle made by King and Country. Galleries are organized by themes and other works in the “conflict” gallery include Bruce Greene’s Susanna Dickinson – Lady of the Alamo and Fritz White’s And Finally Crockett Fell.

“Sculpture, paintings, photographs, historical artifacts – you really need a lot of different media to truly represent the West,” Livesay says.

The Briscoe is partnering with the USO across the street to promote a new Military Admission program that will offer year-round free admission for active military and their immediate family (up to four). The new program goes into effect Jan. 1, 2015.

“I think we may be the only museum in the country that’s across the street from a US0,” Livesay says. “We know how important the military is to San Antonio so we hope this will bring in more of the community.”

Besides exhibits, the Briscoe offers a range of special events including lectures, a book club and films. The Tuesday night film series in 2015 focuses on “The Comedic West.” Each film is paired with a scholar who leads a post-screening discussion. The funny Western films are Blazing Saddles (May 19), City Slickers (June 16), Three Amigos (July 21) and Rango (Aug. 18).

The 210/West Gallery Talks begin Jan. 6 with “Do All Indians Live in Tipis?” by Erwin de Luna and Calvin Ofsie of the United San Antonio Pow Wow. Mitchel P. Roth, a historian and criminologist at Sam Houston State University, discusses “Convict Cowboys and the Texas Prison Rodeo” on Feb. 3. Randy Steele, director of special projects at Lucchese, Inc., shares the history and artistry of boot making on March 3.